COHERENCE AND INTENSITY MOMENTS OF LASER-LIGHT

Taking the modal behaviours of the laser field into account, the coherence properties of laser light can be characterized by mode coherence functions (MCFs) and mode coherence coefficients (MCCs). Changes in laser light properties due to optical operations can be described by transformation laws for the MCFs and the MCCs. The transformation laws as well as transformation matrices for propagation in free space, phase transformations, spatial amplitude modulations and aperturizing are given. Furthermore, intensity distributions and intensity moments in the spatial and in the spatial frequency domains are expressed in terms of the MCCs. General expressions for the beam quality factors, M2s, obtained using the intensity moments and some useful expressions for intensity moments of higher order are discussed.